The present invention generally pertains to systems and methods for organizing help content. More particularly, the present invention pertains to structured methods for creating and maintaining large sets of help topic descriptors. Even more particularly, the present invention concerns offline preparation work involved in creating and managing a set of help tasks that are eventually made available to online users. A collective set of available help tasks will be referred to herein as a “Product Task List” (PTL).
In a closed content or pre-structured help system, a user's query will generally draw a response in the form of a collection of tasks that can be selected to get task-specific help. For example, if a user inputs “I don't want other chatters to know I'm online”, in return they may receive a collection of task choices such as “Hide My Online Status, “Instant Message Options”, “Change My Away Message” or other more-or-less relevant tasks as determined by the query analysis system. The user then selects one of the tasks and is provided with corresponding task-specific help content.
When writers or feature designers create a new idea for a new help topic, they typically assign it a designation or title that becomes the way that writers, editors, software implementers, annotators, data collection and modeling managers, localizers, and the like understand and refer to the underlying task. Examples of task or help topic titles are “Add Printer” or “Hide My Online Status”. For very small PTL's (e.g., fewer than 100 tasks), a custom title in the form of a freely constructed natural language string will typically suffice. For PTL's of more than 100 tasks, problems of scale begin to severely hamper the creation and maintenance of a PTL. For example, as the number of tasks grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort, view, read, and evaluate lists of new proposed tasks against an existing set. Problems of possible duplication, partial overlap, gaps, ambiguous interpretation, and the like, arise and can seriously hobble the work of editors, writers, implementers, localizers, software quality assurance and all others involved with construction of a help system.
Consider an example wherein one writer has entered a task “Improving How Well Your Computer Runs By Defragging Hard Disk” into a PTL of 3009 entries, and wherein another writer is considering the candidate task “Making Your Computer Run More Efficiently By Routinely Defragging Hard Disk”. It may not be immediately apparent to the second writer that there is exists a potential for duplication under the circumstances. Applying taxonomic categories to the bare list can help to alleviate the potential duplication problem, however, consistently applying taxonomic rules can itself be problematic, due to the same descriptive confusion.